Middlemen

After a month, Rhinehart published the results of his experiment in a blog post, titled “How I Stopped Eating Food.” The post has a “Eureka!” tone. The chemical potion, Rhinehart reported, was “delicious! I felt like I’d just had the best breakfast of my life.” Drinking Soylent was saving him time and money: his food costs had dropped from four hundred and seventy dollars a month to fifty. …

To attract funding, Rhinehart and his roommates turned to the Internet: they set up a crowd-funding campaign in which people could receive a week’s supply of manufactured Soylent for sixty-five dollars.